City's South Side is parakeet paradise

James Janega, Tribune staff reporterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Long before spotting four bright green monk parakeets in a crab apple tree in Burbank, Lorrie Ward was a little bit bored with them.

"I think you don't realize how many there are until you start counting them," said the 23-year-old undergraduate student, clipboard in hand and nearly a hundred observation sessions under her belt since October.

Ward, a student at St. Xavier University on the South Side, is part of an unprecedented push to catalog the spread of monk parakeets in the Chicago area.

For years, parakeet sightings and other anecdotal evidence have suggested that the feral South American birds are increasing in number here. The Chicago university's effort will be the first to measure their population density in the city and nearby suburbs and whether the birds have any impact on other bird species.

So far, observations show that the birds once thought of as the Hyde Park parakeets have expanded far beyond the South Side of Chicago. There seem to be more of them than ever now, but the observations suggest that the parakeets aren't wreaking the havoc in Chicago that they have in other U.S. cities.

"Not yet," said Shawn Cirton, a biologist in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service District Chicago field office, who has the parakeets on a watch list of potentially troublesome species. "When studies are done that show they're displacing native species, that's when we'll decide if something needs to be done."

Elsewhere, hulking nests built by imported parakeets atop utility poles have played hob with electrical reliability. The birds have bent down trees in city parks in Austin, Texas, haunted a gothic cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., and sparked a furious public relations fight between animal rights activists and a Connecticut utility that moved to exterminate them.

At Florida Power & Light, controlling south Florida's squawking flocks has become a full time job.

Ward's daily tallies throughout the South Side and nearby suburbs show that there are places where the once exotic bird -- its flashing wings a green as lovely as an Andean hillside in the morning sun -- has become as common as a pigeon. Though so far, not to the exclusion of other birds.

Both charismatic and cunningly adaptive, North America's monk parakeets are most likely the offspring of escaped pets captured in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the late 1960s and 1970s.

For the most part, the feral birds have been welcomed in their new urban environments as enlivening guests, and in few places more so than in Chicago. Former Mayor Harold Washington was entranced by their subtropical chatter outside his snowbound Hyde Park apartment in the 1980s, and a U.S. Department of Agriculture plan to eradicate them there in 1988 met with harsh condemnation from the neighborhood and a legal defense fund.

No such plan has been proposed since, Cirton said. Still, government agencies are keeping a close watch on Chicago's monk parakeets nonetheless, he said, with an eye toward stepping in again in the future if needed.

Others wonder that it will be too late.

"The situation is getting much worse, very quickly," said Stephen Pruett-Jones, a University of Chicago professor of ecology who studies the birds near the U. of C. in Hyde Park.

"It would be much better to deal with them now," said Pruett-Jones, who has consulted with officials grappling with Florida's runaway population. "But that's not how society reacts to situations involving wildlife, particularly cute birds."

For years, annual Audubon Society bird counts have documented the ever-growing population of monk parakeets in the Chicago area, but it was not until researcher Christopher Appelt at St. Xavier University began a research project last year that anyone attempted something definitive to track their progress through urban back yards.

Relying on data gathered by Ward and two other students, the project involves a series of set routes traversed on foot through Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood, the suburbs of Burbank and Evergreen Park and elsewhere.

Armed with a pair of 10x42 mm binoculars, a clipboard and a pair of flip-flops, Ward moved up Sayre Avenue from 84th to 79th Street at dawn one recent balmy Saturday. Her walk is a slow, dreamy amble, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance, looking more often at the sky than the ground.

Women in housedresses peer out of bungalow windows with minor concern. A man backing a pickup truck out of his driveway leans out the rolled-down window to mutter "What's she doin'?"

She records parakeet nests in spruce trees and alleyway light poles, sees monks in a tall elm and the upper branches of a maple.

The observations suggest that the population is expanding into west and southwest suburbs alongside right-of-ways for electrical transmission lines and commuter railways. Anecdotally, they are seen with regularity from Naperville to Gary.

Meanwhile, Pruett-Jones has noted a marked decline in the birds' population in Hyde Park, suggesting that their new territory is hollowing as it expands.

"A few years ago, I first saw these parakeets. Nobody believed it when I said 'Hey, there's green birds flying by,'" said Ward, who lives in Burbank. It was fascinating until she joined Appelt's bird-counting effort, she said.

"The thrill is wearing off," she said.

Others are tired of the birds too. Commonwealth Edison officials still rank the threat from parakeets below nesting raccoons, spokesman Jeff Burdick said. The company's most senior parakeet liaison with the community is a substation supervisor who calls parrot enthusiasts before ComEd crews remove nests.

There is no shortage of qualified people willing to care for the eggs and baby birds that are displaced.

"I just melt, I can't help it," said Nancy Carlson, a bird breeder and parakeet enthusiast who raises the helpless chicks and releases them later.

The Homer Glen woman comes as often as ComEd calls -- six times this year, for a 22 monk parakeet chicks this summer -- and is exhausted during the prime hatching season each spring.

"The whole month of May I can barely string a sentence together I'm so tired," she said.